


Antihistamine

by attheborder



Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV), Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Crossover, F/M, Feelings, Gen, Rip Hunter is NOT Rory Williams, Technobabble, barely a plot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-07
Updated: 2019-02-07
Packaged: 2019-10-23 21:20:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,534
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17691266
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/attheborder/pseuds/attheborder
Summary: The timelines of the Legends and the Doctor & Amy converge, and Rip Hunter is caught in the middle.





	Antihistamine

“As escapes go,” Amy yelled, slamming the TARDIS door behind her, “I rank this one far, _far_ down the list!”

The Doctor, dashing up the steps to the console, didn’t have the breath to respond. A huge blast coming from outside rocked the ship back and forth, whipping his hand away from the lever it was about to pull and throwing him to the ground.

“That one!” he panted, pointing, and Amy was there in a second, dodging a rolling rubbish bin (where had that even come from?) and a swinging, sparking live wire to slap the indicated device into its locked position.

Springing up from the floor as the whirr of the TARDIS’s secondary shields filled the air, the Doctor kept his balance long enough to spin a few more dials before whirling around to face the door they had just burst in through.

“You maniacs!” he shouted, though Amy somehow doubted that the raging swarm of giant psychic Anspalonian hornets outside of the ship could hear him. “We were this close to destroying your base on Saturn’s rings, and you _had_ to go and ally with the hivemind of Enceladus—”

“Doctor, we don’t need a recap!” Amy shouted. As she gripped the railings on the edge of the console platform for stability, she could hear the frenzied beating of the hornets’ wings on the side of the TARDIS.

“Oh. Right, then,” said the Doctor, suddenly breaking into a grin. “Let’s buzz off!”

In a millisecond break between onslaughts of buzzing from outside, he swiftly threw the TARDIS into gear. But the time rotor had barely completed one full travel cycle before its familiar wheezing was replaced with an awful crackling, _wrong_ kind of sound.

“No, no!” moaned the Doctor, smacking the console in frustration.

“Doctor,” Amy said tentatively, straining to hear over the gut-churning popping and clicking of the rotor malfunction. “The hornets are gone, I can’t hear them— have we gotten away? And what is that noise?”

The Doctor hurried over to the navigation panel, brow furrowed in a wince against the horrible creaking, which was rapidly increasing in pitch and intensity. “They really don’t want us getting out of here alive with their secret formula for Titanian eel hypno-jelly—”

“What _is_ it? And can you stop it? Argh!” Amy clutched at her ears, skirting the console to try and get away.

“I’m trying, I’m trying!” the Doctor said, jabbing at buttons on one of the console keyboards. He swung one of the diagnostic screens around to face Amy, presumably to fill her in quickly on whatever was happening, but as usual the swirling Gallifreyan circles and oscillating graphs were gibberish to her. She swung the screen out of the way and came face-to-face with the Doctor.

“Come on, use your words,” she cajoled.

He groaned, indicating the screen. “The swarm have surrounded the TARDIS with a temporo-psychic web. They’re diverting energy straight from the nuclear mines of the Maxwell Gap to harden the localized nodes of the Time Vortex and stop us from getting away! That, what you hear, is the engine going up against seventeen _thousand_ little hornetty minds, all working together to draw us back down out of the Vortex to their nest!”

“And?”

The Doctor winced. “And, well, the TARDIS’ neural matrix is resisting, a little too well, and the resulting tension internodal tension is about to blow us to pieces—”

“So,” Amy said, “do it!”

The Doctor blinked. “Do what?”

Amy threw up her hands. “It, _it,_ do IT! There’s something you can do, there always is, and all it takes is me yelling at you for five seconds to—”

“Aha!”

Amy smirked. “Yup. There it is.”

The awful groaning had reached a fever pitch, every surface in the TARDIS vibrating harshly. From somewhere below the console the Doctor pulled out something that resembled a bright red boomerang, attached to a cable running under the platform.

“Is that a boomerang?”

“Not just any boomerang!” shouted the Doctor over the noise. “Grab my hand!”

So of course Amy did, and as soon as her grip was tight in the Doctor’s, he gave the boomerang a huge heave back on its cord, and there was a satisfying _CLICK!,_ and then everything went white.

xxx 

Rip Hunter had just given Gideon the command to remotely erase Ava Sharpe’s file from the Time Bureau’s database, and was about to follow Ava into the shimmering courier-portal, when a loud bang echoed from somewhere near the rear of the ship. The smell of burning plastic filled the corridor of the Waverider they were standing in, and Rip found himself heaving a deep sigh.

“You go,” he said, waving to his Time Bureau colleague as she stepped through the portal. “Something ridiculous is about to occur, I’m sure, and they might need my help.”

Ava squinted back at him. “Might they really?”

Rip put his hands up. “Aah, you got me. I’m... just curious!”

“Hmm,” Ava said, folding her arms. “Well, I think you _just_ want to run around in that stupid coat some more before I remind you of our dress code regulations the second you step back into the office.”

Rip was speechless for a moment. “I, er—”

Down the hall, amplified by the Waverider’s architecture, came an echo of commotion from the direction of the bridge. Sara’s voice, saying “Oh, what the hell?” and was that Rory… laughing?

Taking that as his cue, Rip squeaked out, “Gotta go!” and bounded off down the hall to rejoin the Legends.

Ava rolled her eyes from the other side of the portal, tapped her wrist to close it, and was gone.

xxx

Amy was flat on her back. The floor was cold, steel— not warm glass like the TARDIS, but she opened her eyes to see the underside of a familiarly-shaped six-paneled console. Turning her head to the left, away from the console, she saw the Doctor’s boots and socks, already standing.

As Amy sat up clutching her head, she saw the Doctor spinning on his heels every which way, observing the place they’d found themselves in. In one hand he held the red boomerang. In the other hand he held his sonic, glowing as it took readings.

“Doctor…” Amy groaned.

“I think we’re—” he began to say, but with a flash of yellow light a young boy appeared out of nowhere and was suddenly standing across the room, holding the sonic like a new toy he’d grabbed off the shelf at Christmas shopping.

“Excuse me!” the Doctor said, in his most peeved tone. “That’s mine.”

“What’s this? Who are you?” said the boy. He sounded the opposite of threatening, which to a skeptical Amy was little comfort, but the Doctor seemed to immediately warm to him, striding across the room with an outstretched hand.

“I’m the Doctor, and this is Amy, and we’re—”

“Oh, what the hell!” A new face appeared, this one belonging to a woman with perfectly wavy blonde hair and a stone cold impression. “Who are you, and what are you doing on my ship?”

Amy had gotten to her feet and was leaning on the console, whose surfaces were flat glass screens and devoid of any doodads, keyboards, knobs or levers. She looked up to meet the gaze of the blonde woman. “So sorry,” Amy said politely. “He can explain— I think.”

She indicated the Doctor, who at this point had given the young boy a firm handshake, retrieved his sonic, and had now spun around to face the huge bay windows that spanned the front of the room.

“Oh, and what do we have here?” he was saying, suddenly serious, gazing out onto the swirling green vortex beyond the windows. Following the Doctor’s gaze, Amy could see dark, jagged, sinister-looking cracks in the firmament of the moving, glowing aurora. Something stirred in the back of her mind, and she was just about to turn to the Doctor to ask him a question, when the blonde woman appeared directly in front of her, scowling.

The woman moved to block the Doctor and Amy from looking out the window, waving her hands in their faces. “Hey, _hey_! I am the Captain of this ship, and if you don’t give me a good reason not to throw you in the brig, you can bet that’s what I’ll do. Now tell me who you are, and how you got here. Wally, a little backup?”

The boy— Wally— suddenly appeared at the Doctor’s side again, in that blazing flash of yellow light. How was he moving that fast, Amy wondered? Some kind of speed-alien?

“It’s really quite simple,” the Doctor began to say, before being interrupted yet again by a deep belly laugh coming from one of the entrances to the wide, steel-plated room.

“Ah ha ha ha HA,” chortled an almost laughably deep, husky voice. “Another floppy-haired Brit for your collection, Sara.” The voice was coming from a huge hulk of a man, with an amber beer bottle clutched in his meaty, gloved hand. “You can start a museum!” His glance fell on Amy next, who met his lecherous gaze with a squint of disgust. “Ah, but I’m keeping that one.”  

The woman, Sara, rolled her eyes. “Rory, please.”

Another man walked into the room. And right as Sara spoke, Amy met that man’s eyes, and then collapsed to the floor.

 xxx

Rip wasn’t quite sure what he’d walked in on. Two people he’d never seen before, who must have somehow appeared inside the ship in mid-flight, were having some kind of tense encounter with Sara, Mick, and Wally on the bridge. But before he could say a word to try and defuse the situation, one of the people, a willowy redhead, had simply fainted dead away.

In a flash, Wally caught her before she hit the ground and laid her gently down. He looked up at the other stranger, a gangly man wearing a bow tie. “What’s wrong with her?” Wally asked him.

“Wasn’t me!” grunted Mick, turning to leave. “I’m going back to my Harry Potter marathon. Let me know when the pretty one wakes back up.”

The bow tie man, dropping to crouch next to his friend, lifted his head to stare at Rip.

“Wasn’t me either,” Rip said, slowly. The bow tie man was looking at him with a wild stare, an expression that contained so many emotions and thoughts and a sheer  _intensity_  that Rip felt utterly undeserving of. The man jumped up, leaving Wally holding the girl, and strode right up to Rip.

“But it _was_ you!” he said, jabbing a skinny finger into Rip’s chest.  

“Rip, do you know this man?”  Sara said, in that classic “you-fucked-up” voice of hers, her jaw clenched.

“Says he’s called the Doctor,” said Wally. “And this is Amy.” Wally turned to Rip. “What did you do to her? She just… dropped!”

“Sara, I swear I’ve never seen him before in my life. Or— or her! And if he’s a doctor, he can, I am _sure,_ figure out what happened and prove I had nothing to do with it. And how did they even get on board the Waverider in the first place?”

“Well, I was just about to find out, when you walked in and, well, see!” Sara groaned.

The Doctor was pacing around Rip in circles like a lion, scanning him with some kind of green glowing pen.

“What’s your name,” he said. A command, not a question.

“Rip Hunter,” said Rip.

“Occupation?”

“That’s, well, that’s confidential—”

To Sara: “And what was the name of the man with the beer?”

“Mick Rory,” said Sara, confused. “And I’m sorry about him, but she must be way sensitive if an insult from Rory is enough to knock her out—”

The Doctor cleared his throat. “Like he said. I’m the Doctor. This is Amy. We’re just stopping by. We have a ship rather like this one, and we were in some danger, so I used this—” (at this point he held up a cheap red plastic boomerang, like the kind you would find at a 99-cent store) “— to enact a special repair program. It transported us here temporarily as a kind of refuge while the ship fixes itself.”

Sara threw her hands in the air. “That makes no sense!” she shouted accusatorially at the Doctor. “This ship is protected by shields, not to mention we’re literally in the middle of the Temporal Zone, so there’s no way you could even find us, unless you also—”

Rip said, slowly, “Sara, he did say their ship was _like this one_ …”

“— had a time ship…”

“We do,” said the Doctor, a hint of pride breaking through his demeanor.

Now it was Rip’s turn to accuse. “But you’re not with the Time Bureau,” he said to the Doctor. “So obviously your time ship is unlicensed and unsanctioned by our official processes, but I _don’t know you_ , which means somehow you’ve evaded my timeline security measures, which makes you very dangerous indeed.”

He gave the Doctor a serious glance up and down. “The bow tie? Really? And the fainting girl? You think we’re _that_ naive?”

Wally was suddenly beside Rip, smirking and pointing. “And look, that’s not even a ship part, it’s a toy boomerang!”

Sara said, “Rip, maybe…”

Rip nodded. They were on the same page now. “This might well be a calculated attack. Disrupting your strategy, distracting you with some unrelated, unimportant comical mission while Mallus grows stronger…”

“Then… they were sent by Dahrk?” Wally asked.

“Better safe than sorry,” said Sara. “Wally, take this man’s gadgets and get them both to the brig. Careful with the girl.”

“Wait—” the Doctor began, but Wally grabbed him and his friend and was gone in a second.

Sara turned to Rip. “You know, Rip, I already feel terrible about that. What if they’re telling the truth? What if there is something wrong with that girl?”

Rip shook his head. “Something about the way that man was looking at me gave me the creeps. Like he knew something I didn’t, about...  _me_. Reminds me of Thawne, when I was under the Legion’s spell, holding me captive…”

“I believe you,” said Sara. “I do.”

“Thank you,” said Rip.

“Let’s keep an eye on them for now, wait for the girl to wake up and see what she has to say,” said Sara, already striding off to the brig, deep in Captain mode. Despite how long it had been, for him, and how proud he truly was, Rip still wasn’t all the way used to her outranking him while onboard the Waverider. He watched as she put a hand to her ear, activating her comms: “Ray, need you down at the brig. We have visitors, and I think you can help us figure out their deal.”

And then Rip was left standing alone on the bridge, watching the rifts in the Temporal Zone outside grow slowly ever more jagged as the seconds passed.

Maybe it was the lingering effects of his meditative trip to China to retrieve Wally, but Rip found himself introspecting a little deeper than he usually did at moments like these. What _had_ the Doctor seen, his face taking on the aspect of a man so pained with guilt and disbelief? And that girl, what had _she_ seen? Despite his vehement denials just a minute prior, he couldn’t shake the feeling that perhaps it _had_ been him knocking her over from a distance, some kind of strange psychic wave. He’d seen stranger in his time, of course, but the thought came to his mind, despite internal resistance, that maybe his eagerness to leap to a suggestion of ulterior motives on the visitors’ part was wholly selfish— he couldn’t stand another second of being looked at like an anomaly, an anachronism, something dangerous. Not after what he’d been through.

 

“Give it back!” the Doctor resorted to shouting petulantly through the glass walls of the ship’s rather fashionable prison, watching Wally pace back and forth outside, casually juggling the boomerang and his sonic screwdriver like he was a trained circus clown.

He shot a desperate glance back to Amy, who was still unconscious on the floor of the brig. She definitely had been right, this _was_ a wildly low-ranking escape. And it just kept getting more complicated by the second.

To Wally, he yelled, “You don’t understand! I need… I need my _things!_ ”

“What don’t I understand?” Wally crowed back, infuriatingly insouciant. “Try me.”

“Well, let’s see,” fumed the Doctor. “Where to start. Amy here and I were attempting to escape from a swarm of giant killer hornets from Saturn, when the TARDIS was caught in a temporo-psychic web powered by nuclear asteroid mines that hardened the localized nodes of the Time Vortex and threatened to destroy the ship’s engines via overload of their geographic haptic fibers. So I engaged a complex emergency recovery mechanism originating from the TARDIS’ backup artron drive which jettisoned the occupants of the ship into an alternate universe via a trans-dimensional wormhole in order to create the accelerational thrust and empatho-dynamic energy needed to both escape the trap _and_ heal the console matrix from the physical damage inflicted by the diseased areas of the Vortex.”

Wally blinked. He’d stopped juggling. “OK, maybe you were right. I didn’t understand any of that.”

“But I did,” came a voice, as someone new entered the brig alongside the familiar Sara. “And it sounds… really awesome!”

This man was tall, barrel-chested like some kind of model for an in-flight magazine, with an interesting haircut. He somehow already a big, contagious grin plastered across his face, as though the Doctor’s dense explanation had been, to him, like a new routine from his favorite comedian.

Sara introduced him, sounding almost embarrassed on behalf of his joviality. “This is Ray,” she said. “He’s going to ask you some questions, and take a look at your things. And I promise you, _Doctor,_ if there are any holes in your story, or we find anything suspicious, there will be… consequences. We run a tight ship here, and do not take intrusions lightly.”  

It was a speech the Doctor had heard nigh-on a thousand times. He sighed, wishing it would just get to the part already where all of a sudden some external force threatened the safety of the ship, and the crew would have to let him and Amy out so that he could take charge and they could all come together to save this backwater corner of their universe, or whatever.

“Thank you very much, Sara,” said the Doctor, on his best behavior. Behind him, he heard Amy stirring, just as Rip rounded the corner to enter the brig.

“No!” he said glancing frantically between the awakening Amy and Rip. “Get him out of here. Please, just do it, for now, I swear I’ll explain—”

Sara’s eyes widened in indecision, but Ray nodded at her gently and she quickly ushered Rip out of the brig as quickly as he’d come, without letting him say a word.

“Want me to get her some water?” Wally asked, and the Doctor had barely begun to nod when in a bright blaze of light Wally was gone, back, and the full glass was in the Doctor’s hand.

“Are you alright?” the Doctor asked, leaning down to help her up and handing her the water.

She took a big gulp and nodded. “Yes, I’m fine. Where are we?”

“We landed on another ship and they locked us up. Taking precautions, I’m sure we’ll be out of here in no time. Just let me do the talking.”

Amy set the glass of water down and stood up, approaching the glass barrier, inspecting her surroundings. “Yeah,” she said, “looks like your talking has done well by us so far, Doctor, seeing as that kid there’s got your sonic _and_ your new favorite toy, and here we are locked in a fancy future prison cell.”

The Doctor rushed to her side. “Not a toy!” he protested, before dropping his voice to a lower register and taking hold of Amy’s shoulders. “Amy, are you sure you’re alright?”

Amy blinked, as though she was trying to focus the events of the past few minutes in her mind. “Yes, yes, I’m sure.”

“What do you remember?” the Doctor asked seriously.

“Mmm… we were in the TARDIS, you yanked on the boomerang… and then I woke up here.” She scratched her head in thought.

The Doctor nodded, and then turned away from Amy, planning to stare pensively at the wall outside the glass barrier while he organized his thoughts, but he found his brooding strategy promptly interrupted by the sight of Ray oohing and aahing over the sonic, which Wally had handed over.

“This is incredible— Doctor, your name is? Great name.” To the Doctor’s dismay (and mild awe), in under a minute Ray had somehow managed to spring open the sonic’s central compartment and was observing its glow. “Some kind of micro-crystalline matrix with embedded physical subroutines, powered by an active-passive vibratory gel— genius!”

“I do appreciate your admiration,” the Doctor says, the pearl of a plan forming under his tongue, “and in fact, if you let me out of here and we head to your lab”— because this absolutely was a man who had a lab, and was proud of it— “I’d be happy to demonstrate all of the sonic screwdriver’s hidden features to you.”

Ray looked up at him through the glass panel as though he were a very friendly Great Dane and the Doctor had just said the word “walk.” Quickly, though, he rearranged his features into something resembling discipline.

“Look, I’m sorry, but I’m not supposed to let you out. Sara said so.”

“Ah, no matter,” the Doctor said. “I can show you something amazing right now, without moving an inch.”

Ray raised an eyebrow. “You can?”

The Doctor nodded sagely. “Close it back up, point it crystal-side towards me right here, and press your thumb— yes, very good, that’s right— against the button in the lower quadrant—”

The sonic lit up, buzzing as the door to the brig slid open with a whoosh. The Doctor stepped out in front of an astonished Ray. “Now wasn’t that spectacular?”

He glanced quickly back at Wally, who was still gripping the boomerang. “No need to zoom-zoom,” he said, hands up in mock-surrender. “Keep your hands on my boomerang if you enjoy the texture, but I _will_ be needing it back.”

Ray looked like he was trying very, very hard to hold back that grin of his. “That was. Uh. Not cool.”

“Wrong,” said the Doctor. “It was _very_ cool.”

Ray’s shoulders slumped. “Yeah. It was.”

“Now, Ray,” said the Doctor. “Sara said you were going to ask me some questions, but so far you’ve just been making rather complimentary statements.” He clapped a hand onto Ray’s solid shoulder. “Not that I mind, but let’s get on with it, shall we? Places to be, et cetera.”

“That’s true, I guess,” said Ray, abashed. “Ummm. Let’s see. Yeah. Questions. Was everything you were saying about getting here via a transdimensional wormhole true?”

“Absolutely.”

“So you also have a time ship?”

“Correct-a-mundo.”

“Where’d you get your bow tie?”

Now it was the Doctor’s turn to grin. “This one? Savile Row, 1969. Bought it on the way to go watch the Beatles play their famous rooftop concert.”

“No way!”

“Yes way.”

“Why’d you come here? Like, specifically, here, to our ship,” asked Ray.

“Great question!” said Amy, who had walked out of the brig’s cage to stand by the Doctor’s side. “I’d like to know that too. Feel like I missed something and now I’m about to fail the big quiz.”

“It’s very simple,” the Doctor said. He glanced back at the glass walls of the brig, and then to Wally. “Wally,” he asked, “would you mind fetching me a dry erase marker?”

A flash of light, a gust of wind, and a marker was dropped into the Doctor’s conveniently outstretched palm.

“You’re not even sweating!” Amy said to Wally in amazement, as the Doctor turned towards the glass and began scribbling all over it. Wally gave her a wink and a salute with the boomerang, and she turned her back on Ray and the Doctor’s nerd fest to sit next to him on a metal bench off to the side of the central cage.

“So, how many people have you got on here?” she asked him, lowering her voice conspiratorially. The least she could do while the Doctor was otherwise occupied was get some information out of this kid, who seemed quite nice, despite his cautious grip on the Doctor’s boomerang.

“Well, it changes all the time, but right now, let’s see…” Wally said, screwing up his face in concentration. “There’s me, Ray, Mick, Zari, Nate, Amaya, and Sara,” he said. “Rip is here right now and sometimes Ava and sometimes Ava brings Gary.”

“So… a lot,” Amy said.

“Well, it’s a big ship, but we do only have one bathroom, so yeah, a lot.”

Amy gagged. “Ooh, that’s just awful,” she said.

“I know,” sighed Wally. “Tell me about it.”

“So are you all…” Amy waggled her fingers in imitation of running feet. “Speedy?”

Wally laughed. “Oh, no, that would be _really_ bad. Just me on that. Plus some special totems for Zari and Amaya, aaaand Nate can turn to steel, and Ray has a—”

“What are you doing, Wally?” Sara had appeared from nowhere. “Keep your mouth shut, these are _strangers_ —”

“C’mon, Sara, I was just making conversation,” Wally pleaded. “And look, the Doctor and Ray are basically best friends now.”

Sara did a double take at the Doctor’s handiwork, which was now filling an entire glass panel of the cell with graphs and mathematical notation.

“—and so the ship’s matrix automatically locked on to an algorithmically-determined alternate universe and coordinates _within_ that universe to transport us to—” he was saying.

“—Which would allow for precision in the amount of energy exchanged to fuel the ship’s escape and repair, and with your psychic link intact it could choose the place that would be safest for you—”

“—and most like the origin ship itself, for maximum security during the repair procedure! Exactly!”

“Sara, this is amazing,” said Ray over his shoulder. “This guy is great! Can we keep him?”

“Just give me a recap,” Sara said, shaking her head. “Make it quick, before I decide to ask one of you _why_ they’re both out of the cage.”

Ray took a deep breath. “Basically, they have a ship like ours, except it’s— what did you say? Smaller on the outside? Anyway, they ran into some trouble, you know, like we do all the time, and to make it out safely, my buddy here engaged an emergency program that transported them here. The energy produced by that transfer was enough to save the ship and begin to repair it, and it jumped them here because, well, it’s a nice place!”

“A nice place?” Sara raised a well-defined eyebrow.

The Doctor interjected, “Specifically, the TARDIS— that’s my ship— determined that _your_ ship, the Waverider, was the place most similar to itself for us to reside while it makes its repairs. Think of your ship like… a cousin. A nice cousin in the countryside whose house we’ve been sent to, to recuperate.”

“Take in the summer airs!” Amy suggested. “You know. The, er, spaceship cure.”

“And you believe them?” Sara said to Ray.

Ray nodded enthusiastically. “Big time,” he said, pointing to the mess of numbers and dotted circles on the wall. “This is very very legit.”

The Doctor took a little bow.

“Okay, so you _weren’t_ sent by Damien Dahrk,” Sara said to him.

“Not familiar with him whatsoever,” said the Doctor.

“Or Mallus.”

“Haven’t had the pleasure.”

“And you don’t have anything to do with the cracks in time?”

The Doctor’s smug expression hardened into something more serious. “I was hoping you wouldn’t get to that. Can I speak to you outside for a moment?”

Sara looked around. “I— yeah, sure.”

Amy moved to go with them, but the Doctor put a hand up.

“Amy, I’m so sorry, but you need to stay right here.”

“But—”

“Don’t go anywhere. I will be right back, I promise, and then we will get back to the TARDIS as fast as we can. Ray, Wally, keep an eye on her. And don’t let anybody in.”

“You’re kidding me,” called Amy after the retreating forms of Sara and the Doctor. “I do not need _two_ babysitters!”

She sat back down next to Wally, rolling her eyes. Reaching into her jacket pocket, she brushed her fingertips over the velvet case of the ring she’d discovered in the TARDIS just a few days ago. The growing suspicion that the Doctor was keeping something from her was like a thorny vine growing around her insides, pricking at her painfully whenever her thoughts moved in one direction or another.

Her glum expression must have caught Ray’s attention, because he suddenly had moved on to another panel of the brig’s cage and was drawing something new with the marker the Doctor had left behind.

“Guuuuys,” he said, as excited as a celebrity about to introduce the winner of an Academy Award. “Wanna play... _hangman?_ ”

“Oh my god, Ray,” Wally said. “Yeah, okay, I guess. You know I’m gonna win though.”

Amy shot another glance towards the door. Sara and the Doctor were out of sight, and she couldn’t even hear their conspiratorial whispers anymore. “I— sure, fine” she said. “I guess this is what counts for an adventure right now.”

  


Sara was explaining to the Doctor the nature of the cracks in time as they walked down the Waverider’s corridor leading back to the bridge.

“Fascinating,” the Doctor said. “The variant equivocacies between our disparate universes must be at their point of maximum modal convergence at this very moment, which is why the TARDIS sent us here when I activated the boomerang— the single best possible match for the energy signature it required.”

“So you’re dealing with cracks in time too?” Sara asked.

“Sort of. Well. Yes. I’m figuring it out. They’re a little different than yours. You seem to have a good handle on their cause. Me… well, I’m working on it. I can feel the answer coming, it’s just around the corner, but... ”

The Doctor ran a hand through his hair. They’d arrived at the bridge, and stopped walking.

“But,” Sara said slowly. “You’re afraid of what it might be.”

The Doctor looked at her, not saying a word. Sara felt his gaze fall through her like a knife through butter, and it would have scared her half to death, except somehow instead of fear there was a deep sense of _relief._ An utter, joyous relief at being known and understood so simply and so graciously by someone who had been to hell and back and had lost so much and had fought so hard and was still standing. Just like her.

“We’re both afraid,” he finally answered, his lucid eyes avoiding Sara as they roamed around the deck of the Waverider, taking in every inch. They returned to her, pinned her tight. “You’re fighting the darkness, I see it. But we have people to protect. People we love. Take Amy, for example.”

“What happened to her?” Sara asked. “It couldn’t have been Rip, right? Some kind of time sickness, maybe?”

The Doctor screwed up his mouth, trying to figure out how to explain. “Well, you’re smart, I don’t have to make this simple for you. That maximum convergence I mentioned. He’s a part of it.”

“What? Rip? But he said he didn’t know you—”

“ _He_ doesn’t. But where _I_ come from, he— or, well, not him at all, let’s say, an emergent quasi-genetic inter-universal phenomenological node corresponding to him— was Amy’s fiancé. He got erased from time by one of the cracks, and she forgot him.”

Sara’s hand flew to her mouth. “That’s horrible,” she said.

“I remember him,” said the Doctor, “but he’s gone from her history forever.”

“So when she saw Rip….” Sara began.

The Doctor shook his head. “Your colleague, the big guy.”

“Mick?”

“You called him—”

“Rory. His name’s Mick Rory. Why—”

“Amy’s boyfriend is— was— named Rory. See, convergence again. When you spoke Mick’s last name as Amy met eyes with Rip, it must have overloaded the psycho-temporal centers of her mind, and after they’d already been inflamed by the hornets and the boomerang procedure it was too much for her. Antibodies fighting against something that isn’t there, attacking the body itself.”

Sara thought for a moment. “So… your friend’s got a time allergy?”

The Doctor managed to crack a smile. “I _like_ you, Sara.”

 

After Sara had dragged him away from the brig, Doctor’s order, Rip found himself in the library, aimlessly paging through one of Nate’s books— waiting, waiting. He considered activating his time courier and simply returning to the Bureau, where there was certainly a heap of expertly triaged paperwork awaiting him at his desk thanks to Ava, but it was like there was _something_ keeping him on the ship.

Rip’s eyes glazed over the words on the page, and fluttered closed. In his minds eye he found himself returning to a second-long image, looping over and over again— rounding the corner to the bridge and catching the eye of Amy, the red-haired girl, for just a moment before she fell to the ground like a leaf from a tree in the flush of fall. Her eyes— it had only been a moment, even less than that, he had to keep reminding himself, but he was sure they’d been a piercing gray-blue, utterly unreadable and strange.

Had the Doctor been wrong? _Did_ he know her, somehow, from somewhere? No, he decided firmly, it was impossible. Even given some kind of unavoidable corruption or glitch after the personality reload adventure with the Legion, Rip was positive there was no way he could forget a girl like that. Whatever that look of the Doctor's had meant, it had nothing to do with him, and everything to do with  _her._

Realizing he’d already come to a decision about what to do next, Rip put the book down and opened a direct line to Gideon.

“Gideon,” he asked, “Are the Doctor and Amy still in the brig?” And there she was in his ear, ever faithful.

“Mr. Hunter, the Doctor has gone with Sara to the bridge. Amy is currently playing a game of hangman at the brig with Mr. Palmer and Mr. West.”

“Thank you, Gideon,” Rip said. “Can you do me a favor? Have Wally and Ray sent back to Ray’s lab. Tell them... Rory made a mess or something, I don’t know.”

“I’ll do it, but I should ask first— what _are_ you up to, Mr. Hunter?”

Rip got up, headed for the door, and sighed. “Once I figure it out, Gideon,” he replied, “I promise you’ll be the first to know.”

 

“So now what?” Sara asked the Doctor. “How do you get back to your universe? If you need help, we might know a guy...”

“Ah, no, you see, that’s the beauty of the boomerang,” said the Doctor. “It’ll take us back when the TARDIS is ready, as long as Amy and I are both holding on to it.”

“Okay, seems simple enough,” Sara said. _God, finally, something that will resolve neatly on its own, without my team having to go racing through time_ , she thought gratefully. “I’ll make sure you get it back from Wally in time, then.”

The Doctor checked his watch, and then took out his sonic screwdriver and gave it a quick buzz. “We’ve got about 10 minutes left, give or take,” he said.

“How about I give you a quick tour of the Waverider?” Sara said, surprising herself as she said it. “I feel like I’ve been a pretty terrible host so far, trapping you in the brig and everything, I’d love to make it up to you.”

“I’d like that very much, Sara,” said the Doctor, smiling. “Your ship is lovely. We just need to make sure Rip stays away from—”

But before the Doctor could finish, a scream wrenched through the deck of the Waverider from the direction of the brig they’d just left, and he went stiff.

“Amy!” he yelled, and he was off like a shot through the corridor.

“Doctor, wait!” Sara called as she bolted after him. She got the feeling this guy had a _lot_ of practice running down corridors.

  


Rip approached the brig quietly, watching Ray and Wally move off in the opposite direction, towards Ray’s lab. Around the corner of the entrance he could see her from behind, copper hair falling in waves down her back.

In one swiftly practiced movement of a highly trained Bureau operative, Rip entered, tapped out the code on the door panel that would lock it from the inside, and moved towards Amy.

He found himself reaching out a hand to lay it on her shoulder, but she must have felt his approach because she whipped around and let out a scream of surprise, nearly falling off her bench.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” Rip said, quickly backing up.

“Haven’t you ever heard of _knocking?”_ Amy said, affronted, recovering her composure as she looked Rip up and down. Well, she hadn’t fainted yet, so that was a good sign, right?

“And why did you close the door?” Amy continued, her clear eyes hardening in suspicion.

Rip found himself flustered and nearly stammering as he tried to figure out how to explain. “I’m Rip Hunter,” he said. “I just wanted to say I’m sorry— about earlier, I think I—”

Amy’s brow wrinkled in confusion. “Earlier? I’ve never met you,” she said. “Is this some kind of trap?” Her eyes flicked back to the now-closed door. “Where’s the Doctor?”

“Oh,” Rip said. “Sorry, I’m not sure, look, I just—”

Somehow his hand had found her wrist, which she quickly wrenched away.

“I can and will scream again, _Rip,_ if that is your _real name,_ ” Amy said. “The Doctor is probably already on his way back here, so if you…”

She trailed off, slowly, as she looked at him, and silence settled over the room. The hum of the ship’s engines and the sound of footsteps coming from outside the locked door suddenly seemed so, so far away. Rip realized he had absolutely no idea what he had come here to say.

“You have no idea what you came here to say, do you?” said Amy.

Rip gulped.

“Me neither,” said Amy, thumbing her chin and looking down at her feet, the bracing confidence that he’d seen on her face just seconds prior now replaced with uncertainty. Rip saw her hand fiddle with something in the pocket of her jacket.

“What’s that?” Rip said. “What do you have there?”

Amy didn’t respond right away, and when she spoke it wasn’t an answer to his question. “I like your... coat,” she said, as though she was trying to distract herself.

Rip grinned. “Thank you,” he said. “I also… like it. Yeah.”

xxx

The Doctor and Sara had hurried down the hall to find the doors of the brig sliding closed in front of them.

“Oh, Rip, what are you _doing!_ ” Sara groaned. She raised a hand to bang on the door and take command of the situation, but the Doctor pulled her back before she could make a sound.

“Shh,” he said.

“What?” Sara said. “Didn’t you literally just say we need to keep him away from her?”

“Yeah, well, maybe I did,” said the Doctor, “but she seems fine, they’re just having a chat, she can take care of herself and to be honest I’m—”

“Curious,” Sara sighed.

The Doctor gave her a look. “I’ve been around,” he said, “for a long time. And when you’ve been around like I have, you very rarely have the opportunity to observe something totally _new._ ”

“Like a time allergy?” Sara scoffed. “Gotta be honest, I’m curious too.”

Down the hall returned Ray and Wally. “Hey, what’s going on?” said Ray. “Gideon called us to my lab, but when we got there—”

The Doctor pointed inside the brig. “Rip must have created a diversion to get her alone.”

“Thaaaaat’s kind of creepy,” said Ray with a frown.

“What are they talking about?” Wally asked.

Ray reached for a panel to the side of the door. “I can activate the monitoring system to broadcast the sound from inside out here or to our comms,” he suggested.

The Doctor swatted his hand away. “Give them some privacy, Ray, this isn’t a soap opera!”

Wally smirked, and muttered under his breath, “On this ship? It might as well be.”

xxx

“So there _was_ no second floor apartment, the whole time?” Rip was saying.

Amy nodded. “Exactly! And that’s not even the craziest thing that’s happened while I’ve been traveling with him.”

“Is it just you and him, then? No crew on the ship?”

“Yup, just me and the Doctor. Ever since I was a little girl. Really long story, but—”

Her voice faltered, and for a moment Rip thought she was going to burst into tears, but instead she suddenly let out an enormous sneeze.

“Oh my god, oh my god I am so sorry. Did I just get you in the face?” Her hands were suddenly on his cheeks, wiping away flecks of spit.

“It’s fine, it’s fine,” said Rip. “Here, take this.” From out of his blazer pocket he drew his Time Bureau standard-issue monogrammed handkerchief, and handed it to her. She took it gratefully, blowing her nose with a sound like a foghorn. She went to hand it back just as he went to take it, and their hands collided in midair, Rip finding his hand wrapped around hers. 

And then it happened in a second— he had her in his arms, and she was leaning into his shoulder, he could feel her breath through the fabric of his clothing, and some kind of strange energy was running between them like they were two poles of a battery. He very nearly expected visions to start flashing before his eyes, but no colors coalesced— instead there was something resembling a story, a narrative weaving itself through his mind like a blind dream, and through the heat of their bodies he could feel its contours and dark centers. A little girl, waiting. A box spinning through time. A crack, gaping, swallowing down life and hope. 

As they held each other, Amy’s sadness was moving through Rip like he was a conduit, an open sluice gate, and inside him a reservoir that he thought was full forever was somehow expanding to accommodate more, more, more.

 xxx

“Hey, British goober. This yours? It started making weird noises while I was watching my movie.” Mick was striding down the hall, holding a sandwich in one hand and the Doctor’s boomerang in the other. Its red surface had begun to glow with a soft scarlet pulse.

The Doctor, Sara, Wally, and Ray looked away from the window to Mick, who stopped in his tracks.

“Am I interrupting something?” he said. He turned to look inside the brig, where currently Rip and Amy were locked in an intense embrace. “Dammit, how did Hunter get the jump on the ginger before me?” There was a pause. Mick looked back at the group, who very obviously had been watching the proceedings. “You are all a bunch of perverts.”

“Thank you _very_ much, Mick, I’ll take that right there,” said the Doctor, gently pressing the boomerang from Mick’s hand as Mick scowled in the direction of Amy, while also taking a giant bite of his sandwich.

“Don’t you both need to be holding on?” Sara asked, worried. “Rip locked the doors from the inside—”

“Oh, he’s got a thingy,” Ray said.

The Doctor took out his sonic screwdriver and pointed it at the door, which unlocked with a hiss and slid open.

“ _So_ cool,” Ray whispered to himself.

 

Rip had lost track of how long he had been holding Amy when the sound of the door opening behind him thrust him back into the present.

The two of them jumped apart like whatever current had drawn them together had suddenly and violently reversed. Amy sniffed loudly, and rubbed her eyes before letting out another violent sneeze into Rip's handkerchief, which she'd managed to hold on to.

With Sara, Mick, Ray, and Wally staring at him like he’d committed some sort of crime, Rip felt like a kid who’d been caught with his hands in the candy jar, with the added stress that he couldn’t even possibly rationally explain away anything that had just happened.  

“Amy, it’s time to go,” said the Doctor gently. He held up the glowing boomerang.

“I’d better, er, go as well,” Rip said, slowly backing out of the room. “Time Bureau stuff… got to get back to it…”

“Wait!” cried Amy, her now red-rimmed eyes moving from the Doctor to Rip and back again. Rip stopped walking away as she said, “Doctor, wait, do we— have to go?”

The Doctor took her hands in his. “The TARDIS is repaired and ready. This was only ever going to be a quick visit.”

Sara cleared her throat and stepped forward, clearly making an executive decision to politely refrain from acknowledging the melodrama that had been occurring just moments before and was perhaps continuing even now, as Rip lingered by the door, unwilling or perhaps unable to step away.

“It’s been a pleasure, Doctor, Amy. If you ever need a favor on this side of the multiverse, just give the Legends a call,” she said.

“The Legends?” said the Doctor. “Ooh, that is great. I love that. Very snazzy. _Catchy,_ even.”  

Amy let out another sudden sneeze.

“Gesundheit,” Mick growled automatically, as Wally and Ray both echoed “Bless you!”

Sara raised her eyebrows at the Doctor, telegraphing, _see?_ He shrugged back.

“Amy, when we get back, I’m getting you some antihistamines. I think you’re… allergic… to something on this ship. Maybe their... cleaning spray. Yes, that's probably it. Now grab hold!”

Amy, rubbing her nose with one hand, grabbed the boomerang with the other. It was glowing brighter now, the pulses longer.

“It was nice to meet you all,” Amy said, through sniffles. “Sorry I beat you at hangman, Wally!”

“It was an honor,” said Wally.

“Next time, Ray,” said the Doctor, “you’ll show me your lab!”

“It’s a date!” said Ray, his voice a barely contained yelp of excitement.

A cloud of light began to surround Amy and the Doctor

“Amy! You’ll find it,” Rip called, hoping she could hear above the growing temporal wind now whooshing through the room.

“Find what?” Amy shouted back. Her clear eyes finally found him, and held on.

“What you’re looking for. Who you forgot. I felt it. I’m sorry I’m—”

And then they were both gone in a blush of glowing gold particles, and Rip found his last few words falling from his mouth as a whisper. “— not him.”

“Wow. Just like a Portkey,” Mick said solemnly.

Ignoring that, Sara turned immediately to Ray. “Ray, how good a look did you get at that green door opener pen thing? Think you could start working on a copy? Could come in handy—”

Ray held up a finger. “Literally already working on it. In my head. BRB.” He power-walked off in the direction of the lab.

“Great,” said Sara. “Mick, go finish your movie. Wally, please go make sure Nate and Amaya aren’t getting too… distracted. We still need to debrief after the mission.”

When they’d both gone, Sara turned to Rip, who was still lingering. “If you want to know what that was all about, with her, I can tell you. The Doctor, he filled me in.”  

Rip shook his head, and straightened up, readjusting his coat and brushing some leftover flecks of Amy-snot off the collar. “I know enough now,” he said. “Just… just enough. There was someone she… forgot. Poor girl.”

“Psychic link?,” Sara asked. 

“Something like that.,”

“Seems to me like the two of them have just as big a battle coming up as we do,” Sara said. “Cracks in time. The entire universe at stake. Probably for the best they didn’t stick around.”

“And on that note,” Rip said, walking back out into the hallway, “I’d best be off as well. Time Bureau stuff, you know. Back to the grind.” He tapped his time courier and a portal opened behind him to the Bureau field headquarters, white light spilling onto the Waverider’s walls.

“You won’t be forgetting her anytime soon, will you?” Sara asked.

“No,” Rip said. “I don’t think I will be.”

 

Back in the TARDIS, the Doctor made a big show of leaving Amy alone by the console while he jogged to the med-bay to grab a few fast-action allergy pills.

When he returned, Amy was examining Rip's handkerchief, which was embroidered with a navy blue border.

“Here you go,” said the Doctor, handing her the pill bottle and a cup of water.

“Oh, thank god,” sniffed Amy, downing the antihistamines.  

The Doctor paused for a moment, letting her swallow, before asking: “Feeling better?”

Amy blinked, the redness receding from her eyes. “Ooh, thank god, yes.”

The Doctor inspected her up and down, and then let his eyes casually rest on the handkerchief she was still holding.

“Nice handkerchief. Where’d you get it?” he asked.

“Oh, this?” She flapped the handkerchief about in the air. “Dunno… I… think it was a friend. Back home, probably.”

The Doctor nodded, then turned away back to the controls of the TARDIS console. “Reversal of the physiological symptoms resulting in psychic erasure of the cause,” he muttered to himself as he navigated. “Too bad. He seemed like a nice fellow. I could’ve set them up on a date…”

He looked back at Amy, who was folding and unfolding the handkerchief into squares. The girl whose life made no sense… he could feel the moment coming, soon, when he’d have to explain. This was a near miss— if she’d remembered Rip well enough to ask the Doctor about him, he would have been in trouble. He should have something ready for her, in case something like this happened again.

“Hmm… something about… how nobody is ever _really_ forgotten…” He snapped his fingers as the seeds of a great monologue began to form in his mind. “Yeah, that’s a good one. Could go like, ooh Amy, you know, people leave traces, if you can remember it, it can return _…_ or should it be, it can _come back..._ I’ll work on it, I’ll work on it... ”

From behind him, Amy let out one last sneeze.

“Bless you, Amy Pond!” the Doctor said, and as he spoke, he was wishing for a real blessing, for a miracle, for Amy Pond—he wished for Rory, the real Rory, to somehow make his way back to her.

**Author's Note:**

> Blame for this fic is placed solely on the shoulders of Arthur Darvill's casting agent.
> 
> Started writing while watching the finale of S3 of LoT, did a quick rewatch of DW S5 finale before finishing. I thiiiiink the timelines work out but if they don't please don't yell at me. 
> 
> Sorry I couldn't fit Nate, Amaya, and Zari in. Sequel coming soon featuring Nate and Twelve throwing books at each other and being smart together. (I'm joking. OR AM I)
> 
> And a final apology for lack of plot. It could've been longer but once I got to Amy and Rip hugging it out, I realized that was all I ever really wanted to write!!!! Thx bye!!!!!!


End file.
